Is the United States Ready for a Truth-Telling Process?

Aug 9, 2017

Fania Davis thinks the time has come for a truth-telling process about racial injustice in the United States. A noted activist and the founding director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY), Davis has confronted systematic racism for decades, working from Birmingham, Alabama to the Bay Area and beyond. But she noticed renewed grassroots momentum to explore the legacy of slavery in the aftermath a white police officer killing Michael Brown, a black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri.

Our project is intended to network these disparate initiatives, now kind of siloed, that are bubbling up all over the country so that they might become aware of themselves as part of a broader national movement; for example, the Black Women’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Bridging the Divide (between Chicago police and communities they serve), Universities Studying Slavery, the work at Georgetown, Harvard and Brown Universities, Ferguson’s Truth-Telling Project, Northeastern University Law School’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Institute, Coming to the Table, Equal Justice Initiative, Richmond’s Initiatives of Change, the Kellogg Foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing, Transformation Enterprise, The Mass Slavery Apology, the emergence of slavery and lynching museums and so many others.